Aftab, Cheung, Kim, Thakkar, Yeddanapudi INFORMATION THEORY & THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION 1 Information Theory INFORMATION THEORY AND THE DIGITAL AGE AFTAB, CHEUNG, KIM, THAKKAR, YEDDANAPUDI 6.933 – FINAL PAPER 6.933 Project History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology [email protected] Aftab, Cheung, Kim, Thakkar, Yeddanapudi INFORMATION THEORY & THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION 2 INTRODUCTION Information Theory is one of the few scientific fields fortunate enough to have an identifiable beginning - Claude Shannon's 1948 paper. The story of the evolution of how it progressed from a single theoretical paper to a broad field that has redefined our world is a fascinating one. It provides the opportunity to study the social, political, and technological interactions that have helped guide its development and define its trajectory, and gives us insight into how a new field evolves. We often hear Claude Shannon called the father of the Digital Age. In the beginning of his paper Shannon acknowledges the work done before him, by such pioneers as Harry Nyquist and RVL. Hartley at Bell Labs in the 1920s. Though their influence was profound, the work of those early pioneers was limited and focussed on their own particular applications. It was Shannon’s unifying vision that revolutionized communication, and spawned a multitude of communication research that we now define as the field of Information Theory. One of those key concepts was his definition of the limit for channel capacity. Similar to Moore’s Law, the Shannon limit can be considered a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is a benchmark that tells people what can be done, and what remains to be done – compelling them to achieve it. What made possible, what induced the development of coding as a theory, and the development of very complicated codes, was Shannon's Theorem: he told you that it could be done, so people tried to do it. [Interview with Fano, R. 2001] In the course of our story, we explore how the area of coding, in particular, evolves to reach this limit. It was the realization that we were not even close to it that renewed the interest in communications research. Information Theory was not just a product of the work of Claude Shannon. It was the result of crucial contributions made by many distinct individuals, from a variety of backgrounds, who took his ideas and expanded upon them. Indeed the diversity and directions of their perspectives and interests shaped the direction of Information Theory. In the beginning, research was primarily theoretical, with little perceived practical applications. Christensen says that the innovator's dilemma is that he cannot garner support for his new ideas because he cannot always guarantee an end profit. Fortunately, Information Theory was sponsored in anticipation of what it could provide. This perseverance and continued interest eventually resulted in the multitude of technologies we have today. In this paper, we explore how these themes and concepts manifest in the trajectory of Information Theory. It begins as a broad spectrum of fields, from management to biology, all believing Information Theory to be a 'magic key' to multidisciplinary understanding. As the field moved from this initial chaos, various influences narrowed its focus. Within these established boundaries, external influences such as the space race steered the progress of the field. Through it all, the expansion of Information Theory was constantly controlled by hardware 6.933 Project History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology [email protected] Aftab, Cheung, Kim, Thakkar, Yeddanapudi INFORMATION THEORY & THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION 3 technological limitations – indeed, the lack of such technology caused the ‘death’ of Information Theory, and its widespread availability is behind its current overwhelming success. SHANNON’S “MATHEMATICAL THEORY OF COMMUNICATION” “Before 1948, there was only the fuzziest idea of what a message was. There was some rudimentary understanding of how to transmit a waveform and process a received waveform, but there was essentially no understanding of how to turn a message into a transmitted waveform.” [Gallager, Claude Shannon: A Retrospective, 2001 pg. 2683] In 1948, Shannon published his paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” in the Bell Systems Technical Journal. He showed how information could be quantified with absolute precision, and demonstrated the essential unity of all information media. Telephone signals, text, radio waves, and pictures, essentially every mode of communication, could be encoded in bits. The paper provided a “blueprint for the digital age”1 Since the Bell Systems Technical Journal was targeted only towards communication engineers, mathematician Warren Weaver “had the feeling that this ought to reach a wider audience than (just) people in the field” recalls Betty Shannon2. He met with Shannon, and together, they published “The Mathematical Theory of Communication” in 1949. The change from “A” to “The” established Shannon’s paper as the new “scripture” on the subject – it allowed to reach a far wider group of people. Why was Shannon’s paper so influential? What was it about this paper that people refer to it as one of the greatest intellectual triumphs of the twentieth century? The answer lies in the groundbreaking concepts that A Mathematical Theory of Communication contains. Concepts that were influential enough to help change the world. There are actually four major concepts in Shannon’s paper. Getting an idea of each is essential in understanding the impact of Information Theory. Channel Capacity & The Noisy Channel Coding Theorem Perhaps the most eminent of Shannon’s results was the concept that every communication channel had a speed limit, measured in binary digits per second: this is the famous Shannon Limit, exemplified by the famous and familiar formula for the capacity of a White Gaussian Noise Channel: P + N C = W log t 2 N 1 Gallager, R. Quoted in Technology Review, 2 Shannon, B. Phone Interview 6.933 Project History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology [email protected] Aftab, Cheung, Kim, Thakkar, Yeddanapudi INFORMATION THEORY & THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION 4 The bad news is that it is mathematically impossible to get error free communication above the limit. No matter how sophisticated an error correction scheme you use, no matter how much you can compress the data, you can not make the channel go faster than the limit without losing some information. The good news is that below the Shannon Limit, it is possible to transmit information with zero error. Shannon mathematically proved that there were ways of encoding information that would allow one to get up to the limit without any errors: regardless of the amount of noise or static, or how faint the signal was. Of course, one might need to encode the information with more and more bits, so that most of them would get through and those lost could be regenerated from the others. The increased complexity and length of the message would make communication slower and slower, but essentially, below the limit, you could make the probability of error as low as you wanted. To make the chance of error as small as you wish? Nobody had ever thought of that. How he got that insight, how he even came to believe such a thing, I don't know. But almost all modern communication engineering is based on that work. [Fano, R. Quoted in Technology Review, Jul 2001] The noisy channel coding theorem is what gave rise to the entire field of error-correcting codes and channel coding theory: the concept of introducing redundancy into the digital representation to protect against corruption. Today if you take a CD, scratch it with a knife, and play it back it will play back perfectly. That’s thanks to the noisy channel theorem. Formal Architecture of Communication Systems The following diagram illustrates the formal architecture Shannon offered as a schematic for a general communication system. Flip open to the beginning of any random textbook on communications, or even a paper or a monograph, and you will find this diagram. Figure 1. From Shannon’s “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, page 3. This figure represents one of the great contributions of A Mathematical Theory of Communication: the architecture and design of communication systems. It demonstrates that any 6.933 Project History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology [email protected] Aftab, Cheung, Kim, Thakkar, Yeddanapudi INFORMATION THEORY & THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION 5 communication system can be separated into components, which can be treated independently as distinct mathematical models. Thus, it is possible to completely separate the design of the source from the design of the channel. Shannon himself, realized that his model had “applications not only in communication theory, but also in the theory of computing machines, the design of telephone exchanges and other fields.”3 All of today’s communication systems are essentially based on this model – it is truly ‘a blueprint for the digital age’ Digital Representation Shannon also realized that the content of the message was irrelevant to its transmission: it did not matter what the message represented. It could be text, sound, image, or video, but it was all 0’s and 1’s to the channel. In a follow-up paper, Shannon also pointed out that once data was represented digitally, it could be regenerated and transmitted without error. This was a radical idea to engineers who were used to thinking of transmitting information as an electromagnetic waveform over a wire. Before Shannon, communication engineers worked on their own distinct fields, each with its own distinct techniques: telegraphy, telephony, audio and data transmission all had nothing to do with each other. Shannon’s vision unified all of communication engineering, establishing that text, telephone signals, images and film – all modes of communication – could be encoded in bits, a term that was first used in print in his article. This digital representation is the fundamental basis of all we have today.